WELCOME FROM THE ESOF 2018 CHAMPION

“It is a great privilege to host the 8th edition of ESOF in Toulouse. It will be a first for ESOF in France. The chosen motto: ”Sharing Science: towards new horizons” already sets the stage for this event. Toulouse is known for its aeronautics and space research but it has many more scientific facets to offer. Renowned for its warm welcoming and its ”art de vivre”, Toulouse has made accessing science to its citizens one of its main priorities. Toulouse is thus the perfect backdrop for ESOF, which is centred on interactions and dialogue between scientists, science policy makers, innovators and the general public. The Université Fédérale Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées with its 29 institutions of higher education and research and its 120 000 students, is proud to support this event in synergy with numerous private, public and institutional partners.

Research is usually considered as a public good which cannot tolerate breaches. The objective of the session is to raise awareness of the importance of research integrity in the practice of science, irrespective of discipline, level of responsibility or whether it is funded by the public or private sector.. This panel will use an international case study to discuss the principles and attitudes of the many actors involved when facing such cases. It will take an interactive step by step approach.

With the help of a few gurus planted in the audience, we present a dialogue around the following theme. We are in a railway carriage on the way to Toulouse. An invited speaker of ESOF2018 is preparing his presentation. He must treat various aspects connected with the general title. He is pretty sure that he will be able to prove the proposition that science is a humanism. Yes, science reached Europe with Humanism and brought with it certainties to replace vague opinions coming from religions.Continuer la lecture de « ESOF 2018: Is science a humanism? »

In 1994, M. Gibbons, C. Limoges, H. Nowotny et alii published The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, followed in 2001 by Rethinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertaintyby Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons. In those works, they presented a shift in the production of knowledge, from « mode 1 » to « mode 2 », presented as two heuristic paradigma.

Twenty years later, the H2020 program of the European Commission structures the EU research program around big societal challenges, abandoning the usual disciplinary structure, but despite constant and pressing calls to a new organisation of science production, universities and research organizations seem to be still mainly structured according to mode 1. Nonetheless, a closer look shows that in this (slowly) moving landscape, some innovative structures are experimenting new ways of producing science, and have deliberately organised themselves to cross either the borders of disciplines (humanities, social sciences and natural sciences), or the borders between public and private sectors, or between basic research and applied science, or between professional scientists and amateurs. Through those explorations they are renewing research outcomes and relations between science and the society.